Egg Panels

The nanny-state social-engineering project that is the White House Easter Egg Roll.

The first thing you notice are the lines. A line to get your ID bracelet. A line to pass through the metal detector. A line to enter the South Lawn. A line for the bathroom. Even a line to escape.

The White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday was a revealing look at the Obama administration’s love of social engineering—and a chilling glimpse of what fate may befall the American people if they fail to rise up against it. The theme of the celebration was, predictably, fitness—an agenda couched in the friendly-seeming slogan, “Ready, Set, Go!” Kids were encouraged to participate in a variety of sports, including football, basketball, and hula-hoops. The purported reason was to get them in good physical shape. The real reason: to wear down their resistance, through physical exhaustion, to indoctrination.

That indoctrination began before visitors even reached the entrance. While standing in line, attendees were forced to listen to a musical group called DJ Willy Wow! and Little Beat the No. 1 Chinchilla. Their message seemed harmless at first: “There’s a party going on/ on the White House lawn.” But soon they were endorsing political apathy, as the duo encouraged children to “Put your hands in the air/ and wave them like you just don’t care.”

Once inside, families were presented with a variety of social control experiments. Foremost was the egg roll itself. Children lined up and, on “go,” proceeded to push their respective hard-boiled eggs across a small lawn. Not only does the practice of rolling eggs have no utility in the real world—a metaphor for the administration’s useless “job creation”—children were also encouraged to cheat. One parent literally held her daughter’s arms like a marionette and scooped the egg forward across the finish line.

Kids were also subjected to the gospel of local, organic food. Whole Foods passed out bags of fresh fruit, presumably to teach kids that they can expect free handouts in life. Across the way, kids learned to “Eggspress” themselves by creating plastic medallions with their names on them—a glorification of the empty consumerism of hip-hop culture. Local restaurants set up “demo stations” to show families how to make healthy snacks. However, they were not allowed to serve the food. “We can’t give free samples or the Secret Service will tackle us,” said a man at the serving station for Moto, a high-end Chicago restaurant. “They’re not too fun.”

Fun was apparently detained at the White House gate. At the Easter egg hunt, kids searched through hay for hard-boiled eggs, rather than eggs filled with candy, i.e., the kind of eggs a child would actually want to hunt for. At the egg-dyeing station, kids used child-safe egg tongs rather than the usual octagonal wire. It might poke an eye out! I hoped at the very least to crack open my egg and have a taste. Not so fast. “Enjoy the beauty of your decorated eggs but please do not eat them,” said a sign. “They are not edible.”

The musical performances were part of the messaging, as well. The television entertainment group Yo Gabba Gabba taught children to follow orders by instructing them to “hop, hop, hop” because it’s “fun, fun, fun.” The audience dutifully obeyed. They followed up with “Party in My Tummy,” an ode to cannibalism. The cast of Glee! later performed a celebration of sexual desperation (“Somebody To Love”), a gay love ballad sung by two men (“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”), and the utopian anthem “Don’t Stop Believin’ .”

Once the children had been sufficiently fatigued, plied with food, and artistically brainwashed, everyone gathered by the White House balcony to greet the first family. “Can we go into Barack Obama’s house?” one child asked his father. “No,” his father replied, “we have to stay out here.” The correct response, of course, is that it’s not Obama’s house, it’s the American people’s house.

First to emerge was the Easter Bunny—a piece of choreography designed to fill the children’s heads with positive associations, which then transferred directly to the next pseudo-deity to emerge: Barack Obama. “Happy Easter, everybody,” he said, failing to mention Jesus. Michelle Obama followed up with a pagan prayer: “Let’s say thank you to Mother Nature!” She then proceeded to praise the benefits of fitness, organic food, and generic Canadian import Justin Bieber. The last elicited screams.

Even the dissemination of the White House’s famous souvenir wooden eggs was an exercise in government control. In order to keep the 30,000 guests moving through smoothly, these souvenirs were awarded only to those who left with their group at the designated time—an obvious behavioral “nudge” dreamed up by Cass Sunstein. And of course, there was rationing: “Limit one egg per child,” the program stated. “No exceptions.”